In my last post I mentioned Babylon Band and I dearly wanted to find a video of Jay Sankey performing it. Sadly I couldn’t find one, but while searching i found some drama posts from 3 years ago featuring Daniel Madison doing one of his usual personality cult character pieces and a dark thought entered my consciousness.
At some point, one of the magicians who has made a brand around themselves is going to very openly and loudly shit themselves in public.
Sorry, I said that wrong. What I mean is it’s only a matter of time until one of them mints an NFT.
Honestly, I thought Madison seemed the most likely to attempt it, possibly Chris Ramsay. Both of them have sort of become a brand in their own right, Ramsay in particular selling merchandise which just says “1st” on it. He even sells flip flops.
As it turns out I was wrong, as the first issue of the Love Letters newsletter from The Jerx¹ contained an advert submitted by a subscriber for an NFT project called MoneyVerse. I DO NOT ENDORSE THIS PROJECT. The link is there purely so you can observe this shit show from a distance. Do not give this person any money.
Anyway, this unfolding nightmare makes it actually topically relevant for me to voice a personal bugbear about NFTs aside from the horrific impact of crypto on both the people duped into buying into it and the planet at large. That is the word fungible.
Funge This!
Very brief intro to NFTs, an NFT is like a crypto coin with a small data packet attached. You purchase it with a smart contract which bestows ‘ownership’ of that data packet to you. I say ‘ownership’ with scare quotes because I could mint an NFT which contains the word “Bread” and say I owned bread, but this being in my wallet wouldn’t make me the only person in the world allowed to use that word. Or the concept. Or anything. I would own that specific instance of the word bread, and it would be the same as any other instance of the word bread.
Similarly when you see awful videos or drawings or AI generated art sold as NFTs, the file itself is too big to put on the NFT (data is expensive on the blockchain for reasons too moronic to explain here. Just imagine it like the early 1990s internet) so the data packet is a URL which points to the file somewhere else, usually a site like OpenSea or, as is the case with Moneyverse, Youtube.
So the person whose wallet is linked to the NFT is the owner of that instance of a URL of a publicly available file. Before you even start to think this matters, the distributed nature of the blockchain means the URL itself is visible to anyone looking to see who owns it, meaning anyone can find the URL, visit the file or video, and even download their own copy. This is what many NFT heads refer to as screenshotting, which shows you just how little they know about the technology into which they have invested more than the value of a medium sized starter home.
When someone downloads the url of an NFT’s attached image to send it back to the ‘owner’ on twitter as a dig at the pointlessness of the blockchain they often say things like:
“Nice NFT you got there. It would be a shame if somebody… funged it.”
So let’s talk about the word fungible.
It’s not fungable, as in, able to funge or be funged, it’s fungible. It’s more akin to a word like compatible. There is no verb to compat but everyone knows that two compatible things are able to work together.
Similarly two fungible things are able to be exchanged or switched without any impact.
Think of it like Scrooge McDuck’s vault. It’s full of identical gold coins and he can take put a coin in, mix em up, take a coin out, and it makes no difference to him which one he gets. Those coins are fungible. Conversely, Scrooge McDuck’s number one dime is non fungible, because he only has one, and it has sentimental (and possibly magical) properties that no other dime has.
Money laundering and fungible goods
I first learned the word fungible from an article on how Amazon Marketplace was being used to launder money by selling low cost items for a high markup as a way of paying for illicit goods and services, which no one who was doing regular shopping would ever click on because of the cheaper alternatives. Products in amazon warehouses are considered fungible. So if reselling known branded items, you can send a stock of these items to an Amazon Warehouse and they’ll be stored together with other items of the same type, and they’re considered fungible. What this means is that when you buy a regular cheap item from a regular seller you might actually be buying an item which was sent to the warehouse by an assassin or a espionage mercenary, because it doesn’t matter from the customers perspective that the goods they bought came from the seller they paid. So long as the right person gets paid and the correct items arrives, it’s all good?
Except high cost items are also considered fungible. Imagine you buy a high tech or designer item and what you receive is faulty or a knockoff, because one of the 10 people selling them sent a container full of cheap knockoffs to the warehouse and is selling them cheap. Which means people buying cheap knockoffs labelled as genuine goods may actually receive genuine goods, whereas people paying full price for genuine goods may receive knockoffs; as far as Amazon knows they’re fungible². But they’re not really.
NFTs are always compared to bitcoins or other crypto currencies in the sense that ‘one bitcoin is the same as another’ but this isn’t true. Bitcoins are stored on the blockchain with unique identifiers, so you can find out who owns which ones (or fractions of which ones)³. They’re non fungible in the sense that they are unique, but they’re treated as fungible because no one cares which one you have.
Money is non fungible. Banknotes have unique serial codes on them, allowing magicians to prove that a specific banknote travelled hundreds of miles instantly on live TV back in the 70s. But we treat them as fungible because it doesn’t matter what the serial number is when we use them. Even without serial numbers, ask a numismatist if they’d swap their mint quality limited edition 50p for a handful of change and then tell me coins are fungible.
NFTs are often minted in huge batches, algorithmically generated to mash together different assets, allowing a large number of technically unique tokens, but I would argue that they are (for the most part) fungible on a practical level. And I don’t just mean the videogame item NFTs which have identical items with serial numbers.
I mean the art project ones too.
Don’t believe me? I linked you to Moneyverse site earlier, where there were five examples of the From Thin Air trick, with different backgrounds and effects applied. So tell me, what were the five backgrounds? If they’re so unique you’d remember them all, right? You could go to a gallery and look at five paintings and tell me what they were afterwards. But I bet all you remember is that he makes a handful of coins appear in front of a green screen.
Fungible.
¹ It’s worth noting that subscribers to The Jerx are allowed to submit adverts to be included in the newsletter, so It don’t think it should be interpreted as an endorsement from that site either. Frankly I’d like to think Andy is not that stupid.
² For my own legal protection I feel the need to point out that this article was written several years ago and I can’t even find it anymore, so there’s every chance that Amazon has fixed this issue now. I use this example only to illustrate a point about fungibility.
³ I often like to tell people about Bitcoin’s bizarre similarity to Rai Stones, which are unwieldy stone discs over 10ft across and used as a form of currency. So difficult to move are these discs that the villages exchanging them usually leave them wherever they’re currently sat and merely keep physical ledgers recording who owns each one. This includes one which was lost during transport and is still in circulation despite being completely underwater and maybe even worn away by currents after all these years. Money is only as real as we believe it to be.